6 ms·

How the Internet Is Loosening Our Grip on the Truth

24 points by stanleydrew 10y ago

wamsachel 10y ago
"the internet is distorting our collective grasp on the truth. " And corporate owned newspapers never did any distorting right NYT? Perhaps if the media had a shred of integrity, people wouldn't be going off to the onion to get their news.
- ryanx435 10y ago
  Yeah, this article sounds like a poorly written plug for the authors book (he provides a link about halfway through the article). He is using the controversy around the election as an excuse to write an ad for his book disguised as an article.
- the_cat_kittles 10y ago
  that is a lazy false equivalence that shows that you probably didnt read the article. the central thesis seems to be that given the wider array of news sources, our biases towards reinforcing what we already believed are further enabled. maybe you could address that instead of saying that "corporate owned newspapers" are distorting. of course every news source has a bias. the point is that there are more now, so its easier to build a more complete echo chamber.
  - wamsachel 10y ago
    No...the author of the article was the lazy one, and it's not just this author because as you may have noticed there's a rising cry for companies to help police cyber bullying, truthiness etc. Notice how no one inside the establishment is assigning culpability to themselves, the self serving conglomerates for the public's distrust. Instead shifting the blame and calling for actions...actions which undoubtably will ramp up propaganda and censorship for the benefit of elites. For every Alex Jones that gets censored, will there be a Chomsky that also gets banned from public discourse? How am I supposed to sympathize with this author when we just had a presidential campaign openly discusses their social media astro turfing whilst leaks reveal dizzying amounts of media collusion, but is there any official cry to end that practice? Of course not. So go ahead and pretend that it's all because the internet allows people to go get their conspiracies from so many different sources, and pretend that the public's distrust in MSM is unfounded and undeserved.
    - justaguyonline 10y ago
      Man, your reply is just exactly one of the reasons I almost never post online like this and just lurk. Not only did you ignore the point of the post you replied to ("lets talk about the article and criticize those ideas in context"), you segued to exactly the kind of narratives that the author of the article was talking about and used them to declaim anyone who disagrees with you. It would be one thing if you bothered to critique the author on any of his actual points, but you decided to ramp it up by somehow claiming if he got his way, we would be censoring Noam Chomsky. ctrl-f, censorship isn't even mentioned in the article. The crux of your argument seems to be something along the lines that that the ideas in this article are being put forwards "for the benefit of the elites", which is the kind of thinking that I (and I think the author of the article would agree with me) that makes as much sense as saying "you are being punished for your hubris by Zeus". As in, you ascribe actions to beings that are fundamentally invisible to others, that secretly control the world around and that you can divine the existence of, but are unable to explain to others in any but in the most vaguest of terms. The point that upsets me about this kind of behavior, is that in viewing it, often people are turned off and are less likely to take part in conversations where they see others treated that same way. The shrinking minority of people who post vs just lurk, already a tiny approximate 10%, in the end becomes the even smaller fraction of people who can put up with and dish out the exact same vitriol. Or, simply agree with vitriol directed elsewhere.
      - jlgaddis 10y ago
        Welcome to HN! Like you, I lurked for a long time (a couple of years) before a comment got me emotionally charged up enough to finally create an account. I'm certainly glad I did, though. Yeah, every once in a while somebody "pees in the pool" but (as I'm sure you already know) normally the conversation and dialogue here is better than what you'll get at most other venues on the Internet. Now that you've got an account, just stay logged in, continue contributing, and help even out the signal-to-noise ratio a little bit more.
      - wamsachel 10y ago
        I ignored the point because I wanted to (coincidentally because that's what the OP author was doing, imo). I wanted to point out the hypocrisy of the NYT, and to point out that a communication giant complaining about how consumers have options, is not good at all for objective truth; and this complaining, both from private companies and government, is growing. I was work and didn't have time to write a clean thesis, so sorry.
  - eli_gottlieb 10y ago
    >the central thesis seems to be that given the wider array of news sources, our biases towards reinforcing what we already believed are further enabled. Really? And was that true when there were hundreds of local newspapers with independent journalists on staff?
boona 10y ago
"For years, technologists and other utopians have argued that online news would be a boon to democracy. That has not been the case." It clearly has. Had it not been for Wikileaks, and various online news organizations we would never have known the sheer amount of corruption afoot in this election, as well as the extent of the death grip political elites have on the entire system. I suppose old media has just become too entrenched and cozy with those in power to speak truth to power. "a recent BuzzFeed analysis of top political pages on Facebook showed that right-wing sites published false or misleading information 38 percent of the time, and lefty sites did so 20 percent of the time." In a recent analysis by the ultra-leftist junk news site Buzzfeed, they've found that right wing sites are worst than left wing sites. Wow, that's some great journalism right there. That kind of reporting is why we should ignore new media and stick with the old.
- existencebox 10y ago
  I was with you until the end. "Stick with the old?" Would you really cite CNN, Fox, NBC and pals as unbiased reporting? From where I'm standing the playing field and the game is almost unchanged, the players are just often different. (You even seem to somewhat contradict yourself, acknowledging that the old news is very establishment-cozy, which to me would beg the sort of skewing you cite for new-news)
  - ryanx435 10y ago
    fyi: he was being sarcastic
    - existencebox 10y ago
      I will leave my comment unedited to show the shame of my admission that I had entirely no clue. I normally find myself chuckling at when other people miss sarcasm but I really didn't catch the tone this time, hope someone else gets to chuckle at me :P
    - pjc50 10y ago
      Poe's law: how can you tell?
jamez1 10y ago
Pretty poor article, the whole thing is filled with far-fetched anecdotes and I don't feel I learnt anything by reading what he wrote. His whole premise is built on the amount of conspiracy theories we know of, rather than actual conspiracies, to show the internet is distorting the truth! But maybe, ironically, he's proving that traditional media is what's broken, if trash like this is given a mouthpiece.
farright 10y ago
Here's some facts that are actively suppressed, and nitpicked to death in the mainstream media. Even worse, a motte and bailey approach is used where you are allowed to state these facts, but only in the context where it is assumed that you are approaching things from a liberal point of view. If you state these facts in a different context, you will be simultaneously attacked by people claiming (1) these facts in isolation are misleading because they need to be seen in the right context and (2) the claimed facts are false and only a willfully ignorant person would make such claims. The people claiming (1) and (2) respectively will never argue with each other. In the replies I get to this post, try to spot which people belong to (1) and which to (2). 1. Your are much more likely to get AIDS if you are gay. If you are white, straight and don't do drugs, you don't need to worry about AIDS (though you should still use protection for other reasons). 2. Black people commit more crime, and this explains the high rates of police use of force against blacks. 3. The US government does not do all it can to limit illegal immigration, and in fact tacitly allows it. 4. Poverty is as much about a culture of rejecting opportunities as it is about lack of actual opportunities.
jakeogh 10y ago
http://i.imgur.com/VUdcIou.jpg http://i.imgur.com/VUdcIou.jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CIMxvS-WEAER49I.png https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CIMxvS-WEAER49I.png https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CINJUoqUwAEkSip.jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CINJUoqUwAEkSip.jpg
- clydethefrog 10y ago
  Some context for the two photos of what seems to be a editorial office doing questionable things?
  - jakeogh 10y ago
    http://gawker.com/here-are-some-top-n-y-times-editors-and-staff-joking-a-1713336525 http://gawker.com/here-are-some-top-n-y-times-editors-and-st...
kahrkunne 10y ago
Pretty sure you're the one doing that, NYT, over the Internet.
cafard 10y ago
Because there was never such a thing as talk radio? Because the Chandlers didn't run the LA Times or Robert McCormick the Chicago Tribune?
SticksAndBreaks 10y ago
Truth has stopped beeing the tamed animal that the news-manufacturer knew it to be. You told it what to be, and it jumped through the hoop and became half-reality by the masses believing. What your hear is the whining for power decentralized away. And those calling for censorship, demand to reinstate it, so they can have it. Those not debunking fake news, but declaring unproofable conspirarcys at work, want to shirk the work or have something to win, when the truth is not found out.
orly_bookz 10y ago
I do believe that Metal Gear Solid 2 predicted this back in, what, 2001? "At this point, Raiden is contacted by AIs of the Colonel and Rosemary, introducing themselves as representatives of the Patriots, who reveal that the true purpose of the simulation was to see how they could simulate and control human behavior in order to prevent society from dumbing down due to trivial information drowning valuable knowledge and inconvenient truths."

24 points by stanleydrew 10y ago

"the internet is distorting our collective grasp on the truth. " And corporate owned newspapers never did any distorting right NYT? Perhaps if the media had a shred of integrity, people wouldn't be going off to the onion to get their news.

ryanx435 10y ago
Yeah, this article sounds like a poorly written plug for the authors book (he provides a link about halfway through the article). He is using the controversy around the election as an excuse to write an ad for his book disguised as an article.
the_cat_kittles 10y ago
that is a lazy false equivalence that shows that you probably didnt read the article. the central thesis seems to be that given the wider array of news sources, our biases towards reinforcing what we already believed are further enabled. maybe you could address that instead of saying that "corporate owned newspapers" are distorting. of course every news source has a bias. the point is that there are more now, so its easier to build a more complete echo chamber.
- wamsachel 10y ago
  No...the author of the article was the lazy one, and it's not just this author because as you may have noticed there's a rising cry for companies to help police cyber bullying, truthiness etc. Notice how no one inside the establishment is assigning culpability to themselves, the self serving conglomerates for the public's distrust. Instead shifting the blame and calling for actions...actions which undoubtably will ramp up propaganda and censorship for the benefit of elites. For every Alex Jones that gets censored, will there be a Chomsky that also gets banned from public discourse? How am I supposed to sympathize with this author when we just had a presidential campaign openly discusses their social media astro turfing whilst leaks reveal dizzying amounts of media collusion, but is there any official cry to end that practice? Of course not. So go ahead and pretend that it's all because the internet allows people to go get their conspiracies from so many different sources, and pretend that the public's distrust in MSM is unfounded and undeserved.
  - justaguyonline 10y ago
    Man, your reply is just exactly one of the reasons I almost never post online like this and just lurk. Not only did you ignore the point of the post you replied to ("lets talk about the article and criticize those ideas in context"), you segued to exactly the kind of narratives that the author of the article was talking about and used them to declaim anyone who disagrees with you. It would be one thing if you bothered to critique the author on any of his actual points, but you decided to ramp it up by somehow claiming if he got his way, we would be censoring Noam Chomsky. ctrl-f, censorship isn't even mentioned in the article. The crux of your argument seems to be something along the lines that that the ideas in this article are being put forwards "for the benefit of the elites", which is the kind of thinking that I (and I think the author of the article would agree with me) that makes as much sense as saying "you are being punished for your hubris by Zeus". As in, you ascribe actions to beings that are fundamentally invisible to others, that secretly control the world around and that you can divine the existence of, but are unable to explain to others in any but in the most vaguest of terms. The point that upsets me about this kind of behavior, is that in viewing it, often people are turned off and are less likely to take part in conversations where they see others treated that same way. The shrinking minority of people who post vs just lurk, already a tiny approximate 10%, in the end becomes the even smaller fraction of people who can put up with and dish out the exact same vitriol. Or, simply agree with vitriol directed elsewhere.
    - jlgaddis 10y ago
      Welcome to HN! Like you, I lurked for a long time (a couple of years) before a comment got me emotionally charged up enough to finally create an account. I'm certainly glad I did, though. Yeah, every once in a while somebody "pees in the pool" but (as I'm sure you already know) normally the conversation and dialogue here is better than what you'll get at most other venues on the Internet. Now that you've got an account, just stay logged in, continue contributing, and help even out the signal-to-noise ratio a little bit more.
    - wamsachel 10y ago
      I ignored the point because I wanted to (coincidentally because that's what the OP author was doing, imo). I wanted to point out the hypocrisy of the NYT, and to point out that a communication giant complaining about how consumers have options, is not good at all for objective truth; and this complaining, both from private companies and government, is growing. I was work and didn't have time to write a clean thesis, so sorry.
- eli_gottlieb 10y ago
  >the central thesis seems to be that given the wider array of news sources, our biases towards reinforcing what we already believed are further enabled. Really? And was that true when there were hundreds of local newspapers with independent journalists on staff?

boona 10y ago

"For years, technologists and other utopians have argued that online news would be a boon to democracy. That has not been the case." It clearly has. Had it not been for Wikileaks, and various online news organizations we would never have known the sheer amount of corruption afoot in this election, as well as the extent of the death grip political elites have on the entire system. I suppose old media has just become too entrenched and cozy with those in power to speak truth to power. "a recent BuzzFeed analysis of top political pages on Facebook showed that right-wing sites published false or misleading information 38 percent of the time, and lefty sites did so 20 percent of the time." In a recent analysis by the ultra-leftist junk news site Buzzfeed, they've found that right wing sites are worst than left wing sites. Wow, that's some great journalism right there. That kind of reporting is why we should ignore new media and stick with the old.

existencebox 10y ago
I was with you until the end. "Stick with the old?" Would you really cite CNN, Fox, NBC and pals as unbiased reporting? From where I'm standing the playing field and the game is almost unchanged, the players are just often different. (You even seem to somewhat contradict yourself, acknowledging that the old news is very establishment-cozy, which to me would beg the sort of skewing you cite for new-news)
- ryanx435 10y ago
  fyi: he was being sarcastic
  - existencebox 10y ago
    I will leave my comment unedited to show the shame of my admission that I had entirely no clue. I normally find myself chuckling at when other people miss sarcasm but I really didn't catch the tone this time, hope someone else gets to chuckle at me :P
  - pjc50 10y ago
    Poe's law: how can you tell?

jamez1 10y ago

Pretty poor article, the whole thing is filled with far-fetched anecdotes and I don't feel I learnt anything by reading what he wrote. His whole premise is built on the amount of conspiracy theories we know of, rather than actual conspiracies, to show the internet is distorting the truth! But maybe, ironically, he's proving that traditional media is what's broken, if trash like this is given a mouthpiece.

farright 10y ago

Here's some facts that are actively suppressed, and nitpicked to death in the mainstream media. Even worse, a motte and bailey approach is used where you are allowed to state these facts, but only in the context where it is assumed that you are approaching things from a liberal point of view. If you state these facts in a different context, you will be simultaneously attacked by people claiming (1) these facts in isolation are misleading because they need to be seen in the right context and (2) the claimed facts are false and only a willfully ignorant person would make such claims. The people claiming (1) and (2) respectively will never argue with each other. In the replies I get to this post, try to spot which people belong to (1) and which to (2). 1. Your are much more likely to get AIDS if you are gay. If you are white, straight and don't do drugs, you don't need to worry about AIDS (though you should still use protection for other reasons). 2. Black people commit more crime, and this explains the high rates of police use of force against blacks. 3. The US government does not do all it can to limit illegal immigration, and in fact tacitly allows it. 4. Poverty is as much about a culture of rejecting opportunities as it is about lack of actual opportunities.

jakeogh 10y ago

http://i.imgur.com/VUdcIou.jpg http://i.imgur.com/VUdcIou.jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CIMxvS-WEAER49I.png https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CIMxvS-WEAER49I.png https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CINJUoqUwAEkSip.jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CINJUoqUwAEkSip.jpg

clydethefrog 10y ago
Some context for the two photos of what seems to be a editorial office doing questionable things?
- jakeogh 10y ago
  http://gawker.com/here-are-some-top-n-y-times-editors-and-staff-joking-a-1713336525 http://gawker.com/here-are-some-top-n-y-times-editors-and-st...

kahrkunne 10y ago

Pretty sure you're the one doing that, NYT, over the Internet.

cafard 10y ago

Because there was never such a thing as talk radio? Because the Chandlers didn't run the LA Times or Robert McCormick the Chicago Tribune?

SticksAndBreaks 10y ago

Truth has stopped beeing the tamed animal that the news-manufacturer knew it to be. You told it what to be, and it jumped through the hoop and became half-reality by the masses believing. What your hear is the whining for power decentralized away. And those calling for censorship, demand to reinstate it, so they can have it. Those not debunking fake news, but declaring unproofable conspirarcys at work, want to shirk the work or have something to win, when the truth is not found out.

orly_bookz 10y ago

I do believe that Metal Gear Solid 2 predicted this back in, what, 2001? "At this point, Raiden is contacted by AIs of the Colonel and Rosemary, introducing themselves as representatives of the Patriots, who reveal that the true purpose of the simulation was to see how they could simulate and control human behavior in order to prevent society from dumbing down due to trivial information drowning valuable knowledge and inconvenient truths."